Tuesday, 2 December 2014

Moving Mailboxes from One Database to Another in Exchange 2013

In this article you will get to know about how to move mailbox from one database to another in Exchange 2013.

There might be various reasons for moving mailboxes such as migration from Exchange to Office 365, troubleshooting etc. This sometimes become a studious task but can be easily done by following the procedure of moving mailbox. This includes moving mailbox from the database to a target mailbox database that can be hosted on the same server or different server in a different active directory site.

Exchange 2013 has 3 main types of mailbox moves. They are as:

Basically there are two types of move requests but in this article we’ll cover only Non-Batch Requests:

Batch Move Requests is used when referring to move more than one mailbox at a moment.

Non-Batch Move Requests is used when referring to move a single mailbox at a moment.

Non-Batch Move Request

For Non-Batch Move Request i.e., to move a single mailbox we can use the same GUI. In this new EAC or the New-Move Request cmdlet are used as previously used to form Exchange 2010.
Following steps should be performed to create a local move requests by using the EAC (Exchange admin center):-

In EAC, go to recipients > migration and then click the + icon:

Figure 1: EAC Migration Pane

Then you move to the Select the users window. In this you have to add the user you want to move and then click next.

Figure 2: Select the user

After completing the above procedure, Move configuration page will pop up. In this you have to specify a name for the new batch. Then select if you want to move the primary mailbox or the archive mailbox or primary mailbox along with the archive. Next select the target database(s). On clicking More options, you can set the bad item limit and the large item limit. Click next:

Figure 3: Move Configuration

Once the move is complete Start the batch page will pop, here you have to specify to which mailbox to send a report. There is one another option you can choose i.e., Automatically start the batch or Manually start the batch. Click new to start the move process:

Figure 4: Start the batch

Here you can watch the moving procedure in progress through the migration pane. And on clicking on the view details on the right side you can view further details of the moving process.

Figure 5: Move Status
As the procedure of moving terminated, you can see the STATUS will change to Completed.

Figure 6: Move Completed

As we have configured send as notification in the very beginning, so as the process of migration terminated, Exchange automatically send a report to the Administrator Mailbox of successfully completion of the procedure.

Conclusion

In the above segment we have explained how to move a single mailbox from one database to another. In case if you have offline EDB file mailbox and want to move it into healthy EDB file format then I suggest you to try Exchange recovery software which helps to restore offline EDB file into a healthy working EDB file format as well as you can successfully perform single or bulk migration process without any complication. Follow this Link for more information about this software: http://www.edbtopst.org/exchange-recovery-software.html